Looking at posts on Persian poetry over at Adages and Proverbs made me remember the raptures of reading Omar Khayyam and Hafiz. There is a legend of Jamshid’s cup, once holding the elixir of immortality, being lost in the rubble of Persepolis to become something akin to the Grail cup of an eternal longing and quest, like the Philosopher’s Stone, immortal in the mists of time and the ruins of war and fate.
I’m thinking of a quatrain of Omar Khayyam’s Rubáiyát and how one seques into a Hafiz ghazal — This is very beautiful stuff, and the way it’s set up is very helpful. It reminded me of something a friend half-translated by Hafiz, ghazal 142. The similarities are striking.
Literal translation of a Rubáiyát quatrain:
The palace where Jamshid held his cup
The doe and the fox now rest and sup
Bahram who hunted game non-stop
Was hunted by death when his time was up.
Meaning:
The palace where Arthur sought the Grail
Is the resting home of the weak and frail
And the knight who challenged death on its trail
On the ocean of death forward must sail
Chasing the temporal is to no avail
As soon as you go through death’s dark veil.
Fitzgerald’s translation:
They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep:
And Bahram, that great hunter – the Wild Ass
Stamps o’er his Head, and he lies fast asleep.
German:
Wüst liegt der Palast,
Wo einst Behram geprasst.
Jetzt scheucht von der Stelle
Der Leu die Gazelle
Wo der König im Jagen
Wilde Psel erschlagen,
Versank er im Sumpfe
Beim Eselstriumphe.
Now look at the Hafiz ghazal the same friend partially translated. I notice with awe how similar it is to the rubayi above.
Hafiz Ghazal 142 – half transl.
For years, my heart searched for Jamshid’s cup,
begging from strangers what itself had always possessed.
From lost souls on the seashore,
my heart sought the pearl that lay outside the oyster of time and space.
Then, at long last, I took my plight to an old Magus;
an old Magus who knew how to solve mysteries
with the aid of his great insight.
It was at evening when I found him merry and laughing
with a beaker of wine in his hand,
watching hundreds of pictures
which were reflected in the depths of the vessel.
I asked him, when did the Wise One give you this cup
in which you can see the cosmos?
He said, on the day when He was making the vault of heaven.